Ye Olde Inn

Can the Hero's hire mercenaries to help them during the dark company quest?

By default I don't think they're built into the quest. But if they're at least Champions by now (which they ought to be), then I would say allow it (if I were Zargon).

The only issue will be running out of those figures, because the 4 part mega quest specifically calls for using them as "Dark Warriors." If you have plenty of spares, go for it, but I recommend using some kind of token or multiple colors to distinguish them! (they came in mostly Red but also Gray from BQP... and the ultra-rare black)

home rule! but need some differences to be recognized from the Dark Warriors, of course

I cant see why not, just like any game new rules added with expansions are not conditional to only that expansion.
They are part of the game. Dark Company uses the red plastic, and since there are a lot, Id say stick with it.
The Grey ones were used to introduce Mercenaries, so again perfect for it, since there should already be enough
red for the dark Company. Black plastic was something you saw at Conventions as hand outs. They actually had
both Mercenaries and Ogres, I got quite a few at various Cons.

Wizards of Morcar used red for Men-At-Arms, so for EU players, it served both good and bad... but the same is true of BQP, where gray served for both "good" mercenaries for hire and "bad" evil warriors. Out in the wild there will be a lot more red ones to find since you got 12 in each of the EU sets but only 6 in the NA exclusive.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were black versions of every figure out there. I've seen quite a few examples many places online...

I have only ever seen the black plastic Mercenaries and Ogres that they passed out at conventions,
but if they ever made them of the Heroes that would be really cool. For that matter would love to
see any of the others if they made them.

I also saw some pics at some point of the original greens for the 4 Heroes, does anyone here know about those,
or where they ended up?

Aside from needing a lot of mercs to represent both sides of the conflict, another issue you might have is the hero group splitting off in different directions. Heroes backed up by 3 mercs each tend to split up from the other groups and whilst this is normally a good thing, it won’t work in the Dark Company unless you have four game boards, four sets of doors furniture and traps, and a very large gaming table.

I redrew this adventure so that it can be played through four different dungeon levels one after another, more like a standard expansion, and that might work better for including mercenary hired help.
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5013&hilit=Redrawing+the+dark+company

Pancho wrote:Aside from needing a lot of mercs to represent both sides of the conflict, another issue you might have is the hero group splitting off in different directions. Heroes backed up by 3 mercs each tend to split up from the other groups and whilst this is normally a good thing, it won’t work in the Dark Company unless you have four game boards, four sets of doors furniture and traps, and a very large gaming table.

I redrew this adventure so that it can be played through four different dungeon levels one after another, more like a standard expansion, and that might work better for including mercenary hired help.
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5013&hilit=Redrawing+the+dark+company

That is exactly why I got 4 boards.

It's originally meant to be played with one board, the Heroes all cross over together, but if you've got that kind of space and time... (maybe two Zargons to help manage things)

As for black figures, there are user contributed images that have been posted on Amazon for years (not sure who contributed them but they seem legit) featuring:
black: goblins, gargoyles, chaos warriors, orcs, zombies, skeletons, fimirs... as well as a red Ogre chieftain. Someone from the inn has posted images of gray (rather than blue or red) Ogres as well.